


Air and Space

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfeild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:11:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Petrova grows up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Air and Space

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lia for the beta.
> 
> Written for Lysimache

 

 

Petrova Fossil was the middle child, and the middle child of a family with two very talented sisters as bookends. She understood her sisters and she loved them very much, but there were times when she was very very glad they lived so far away. There were times when she was glad that she had the air and the space to know herself. 

As time went by, and her life changed so much, she felt more and more the distance that lay between them. GUM had been willing to put her through school, and college, and an engineering degree. When Posy could take the time away from the company to come visit, or when Pauline sent her twice monthly telegrams, Petrova remembered the old days, when they shared a room and danced pas de chats across the beds. The times when they could look at her and know she was more than the dance uniform, and then the times when they only saw themselves echoed back. They knew her, inside and out, and she knew them just as well. She was a mystery to them, but a mystery they knew the answer to. But when she finally left home -- the last one to do so, even after Sylvia -- her room mates were girls not related to her, by love or by blood.

Petrova thought often of the people who had given her life. Her father, the Russian swinging through the snow in his carriage. Her mother, about whom Petrova knew nothing. She was part of them, and she knew less about them then she did the woman down the hall of her boarding house, who cooked for the men in the bar. Her room mates, Mary and Christine, asked Petrova once or twice about her name, her provenance as a Russian orphan. But when it became clear that she was, to her bones, as English as the words she spoke, her history became a thing without interest for them. It was more fascinating to discuss where they planned to go once they graduated, what they hoped to do with their degrees. 

The war had been very strange for Petrova. Aside from her country being at war, and her family being so far away, she had been helpless. Not old enough to do anything she felt could do any good, not boy enough to sign up and fight, she had rolled and rolled and rolled bandages with Sylvia. She had collected scrap metal and hidden in bunkers and wished -- so hard! -- that she could be flying the planes in the dog fights. She hated not knowing what would happen, and she hated not having a place in it all where she could be of true use, the way whe knew she could be.

Christine had spent the war in Canada, her parents having sent her and her two sisters away. She said it was a place so large, she felt lost the whole time. Christine understood how lost a gilr could be when there was nothing to hold onto.

Mary was an only child and her parents had kept her in the countryside with them. Mary had had her first kiss from a pilot, and Petrova had tried to get all the information she could out of her -- what was it like for him to fly? what had the plane looked like? -- but Mary had not thought any of that was important. Pretova had kissed a pilot once, as well, but he hadn't understood why she cared so much about the plane, and had grown cross when she wouldn't walk alone with him.

Christine's older sister had stayed in Montreal. Her younger sister had returned to England, and lived still with their parents. Christine had left home almost as soon as she returned, to run off to the big city and study Literature. The words fascinated her, she said. The words, and the worlds people made for themselves when the real worlds didn't fit, or they didn't fit the real world. She was younger than Petrova, and smaller, and quieter, which was the only thing Petrova wasn't used to. In a house with Pauline and Posy, it was easier, sometimes, to let the noise run off her back and out the windows. She was used to keeping her own council. One of very few girls in her line of study, her back got slicker and the noise ran faster, so to have Christine sitting and watching her as they toasted their bread in the fireplace, or while Mary mended Petrova's hem, was quite strange.

Petrova was the one who sat and watched. She wasn't the one on the stage, or in the flood lights, speaking and dacning and grabbing the eye. She could still dance -- had danced, with many a service man -- she could follow a tune, but she wanted to be beyond the eye, above the clouds, performing a duet with a partner of metal and air.

Fanciful thoughts, but when she spent her days dealing with numbers and calculations, her ideas wanted to run freely, soaring above her. She wanted to disappear, but in a very particular way, in a way she could control. Pauline and Posy let others tell them, show them, how they could disappear. Petrova never wanted to let someone else know where she went, when she floated off.

Christine always looked like she could follow Petrova, if she wanted. She had the words to understand what Petrova wanted. All those books, all those things she knew -- Christine understood Petrova. She had sisters too, she had spent her life in a room with two other girls. Petrova could see the space Christine held around herself, the way Christine moved in the world. Christine needed space, but space with edges, so when the world came rushing by, Christine could reach out and grab it.

Petrova needed the space the air could give her, but she wasn't sure she was ever going to get high enough to feel it. 

 


End file.
